Royal Baths, Better Luck Next Life. I usually find the after-plucking squeaks of guitars (a ubiquitous studio-production technique of the last ten years) to be akin to fingernails on a blackboard. But Royal Baths opens the first song on this album, “Darling Divine,” with a whole passel of ‘em, and it’s great. The frisky fingering leads you to continually expect the unexpected. There’s some straight-ahead rock stuff like “Nightmare Voodoo,” but most songs have rhythmic and vocal variations that go well beyond the wild, sitar-satiric guitar solos. Swoops of sound interrupt the vocals, echo chambers turn plinks into yowls. The soft and reflective becomes the ominous and overwhelming. There’s a song called “Faster and Harder,” but the music for it is strangely and wonderfully neither.

As the final song, “Someone New,” says,

Tell my girl she’s now alone.

This time I’m not coming home.

Keep my records and sell the rest.

Tell my girl I loved her best.

Drown in Royal Baths: Creepily cool from top to bottom.